Archive for October, 2007

At long last, after several requests, I’ve posted the slides, notes, and client and server examples from the tutorial I gave at LinuxConf.eu 2007 in Cambridge back in September. Hyper-observant readers will notice that the client program I posted does not match the listing in the notes I handed out; this is because I fixed a race condition in how completions are collected.

I’m not sure how useful all this is without me talking about it, but I guess every little bit helps. And of course, if you have questions about RDMA or InfiniBand programming, come on over to the mailing list and fire away.

With yesterday’s release of kernel 2.6.23, I thought it might be a good time to look back at what significant changes are in 2.6.23, and what we have queued up for 2.6.24..

So first I looked at the kernel git log from the v2.6.22 tag to the v2.6.23 tag, and I was surprised to find that nothing really stood out. We merged something like 158 patches that touched 123 files, but I couldn’t really find any headline-worthy new features in there. There were just tons of fixes and cleanups all over, although mostly in the low-level hardware drivers. For some reason, 2.6.23 was a pretty calm development cycle for InfiniBand and RDMA, which means that at least that part of 2.6.23 should be rock solid.

2.6.24 promises to be a somewhat more exciting release for us. In my for-2.6.24 branch, in addition to the usual pile of fixes and cleanups, I have a couple of interesting changes queued up to merge as soon as Linus starts pulling things in:

Sean Hefty’s quality-of-service support. These changes allow administrators to configure the network to give different QoS parameters to different types of traffic (eg IPoIB, SRP, and so on).

A patch from me (based on Sean Hefty’s work) to handle multiple P_Keys for userspace management applications. This is one of the last pieces to make the InfiniBand stack support IB partitions fully.

Also, bonding support for IP-over-InfiniBand looks set to go in through Jeff Garzik’s tree. This is something that I’ve been wanting to see for years now; the patches allow the standard bonding module to enslave IPoIB interfaces, which means that multiple IB ports can finally be used for IPoIB high-availability failover. Moni Shoua and others did a lot of work and stuck with this for a long time, and the final set of patches turned out to be very clean and nice, so I’m really pleased to see this get merged.